The best we have found, hands down, is Chromix's ColorThink Pro. Not only does it do gamut sizes, white pt, black pt, etc. but it allows you to compare profiles in 3D against one another AND overlay individual images.

As such it allows one to see which printer, paper, rendering intent et al is best for a particular image!

Apparently, they have lots of other interesting features in the works..

You should know that, at least on the PC, Colorthink Pro is the buggiest application you will ever run into. I reported about 60 bugs 15 months ago, most had not been fixed as of beta 9 or 10. I stopped checking after that, so it is possible things have improved in the last several betas. Currently Chromix is on 1.01 beta 13. Note that these bugs were mostly reproducible on two different machines. About 8 or 9 of these bugs involved producing wrong delta-E colors or wrong results--they weren't just cosmetic or error codes being reported.

That said, it does some very cool things. Just remember that you are actually purchasing a beta and you won't be disappointed about the amount of money you spent.

Please excuse my questions if they are 'innocent' as I'm only a beginner in this space...

I have had a look at Mac's Colorsynch and it gives me single snapshots of the gamut of one device. It doesn't allow to superimpose gamuts and realise how much you will lose by printing one way or another.

I guess that the basic questions I am asking myself are:

- What can my printer do? i.e. does it fit inside one of the traditional colour spaces and how will this degrade what I see on screen?

- What does my screen display? Is this a limit compared to what my printer can do?

- How do I handle both photographs and software in terms of workflow? For instance LightRoom works in Pro, what will I lose by exporting to RGB or whatever my printer constraints me to?

I was impressed at first sight by Bill Atkinson's software in VJ issue 15, but I'm not sure what I would do with this piece of software if I had it... By the way, anyone knows what he was using?

I'd suggest starting with a decent book on color management, or at least a good chapter on the subject. You need to get up to speed on a bunch of basic concepts to comprehend what is going on. Very briefly, Prophoto RGB is a very wide gamut RGB space within which any real world color (and a lot of physically impractical color gamut) will fit. It's sort of an imaginary space far bigger than any physical device has the capacity to display. Your monitor is an additive color device with its own gamut, often limited to something close to sRGB for inexpensive monitors, or approaching the wider Adobe RGB for an expensive one; the image you see is by nature different from the reflective color seen in a print. A really good inkjet printer on semigloss/luster paper can reproduce a gamut approaching that of Adobe RGB in most directions, sometimes exceeding it in a few areas.

A good way to visualize different profile gamuts is on screen using a software tool that produces a three-dimensional and rotatable gamut plot, and that permits you to compare two different profiles. For example, my monitor profile plot is much, much "wider" than my printer profile along certain axes; but the printer has a rather "deeper" gamut in other directions. At least I can conceptualize how they differ, though real-world appearance of the print is the true test. I confess that I'm using Microsoft's free and relatively brain-dead color management applet, but...did I mention that it's free?

I believe Bill Atkinson wrote an entire suite of color management and profiling applications himself, to assist in the iterative process of developing profiles for the extremely non-linear Epson 7600/9600 inkjet printers. At least that's what I recall from the one-day course in inkjet printing and Photoshopping he gave at George Eastman house about 3 years ago.

I have had a look at Mac's Colorsynch and it gives me single snapshots of the gamut of one device. It doesn't allow to superimpose gamuts and realise how much you will lose by printing one way or another.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=123368\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

ColorSync Utility surely does let you compare gamut plots.

At the upper-left of the gamut plot is a disclosure triangle. Click it, select "Hold for Comparison," and choose a new profile. The original profile will display as a wireframe, the new profile will display as a solid shape. Lather, rinse, repeat as desired.

You can also choose what the graph is rendering (Lab, Yuv, etc.) from that menu.

At the upper-left of the gamut plot is a disclosure triangle. Click it, select "Hold for Comparison," and choose a new profile. The original profile will display as a wireframe, the new profile will display as a solid shape. Lather, rinse, repeat as desired.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=123422\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

That's neat...

According to this my LCD has a narrowing gamut than my clunky two cartridge printer! Both are ridiculously small compared to RGB, let alone Adobe RGB...

Can't wait for Michael's video tutorial: the more I learn the more I am confused.

You should know that, at least on the PC, Colorthink Pro is the buggiest application you will ever run into. I reported about 60 bugs 15 months ago, most had not been fixed as of beta 9 or 10. I stopped checking after that, so it is possible things have improved in the last several betas. Currently Chromix is on 1.01 beta 13. Note that these bugs were mostly reproducible on two different machines. About 8 or 9 of these bugs involved producing wrong delta-E colors or wrong results--they weren't just cosmetic or error codes being reported.

That said, it does some very cool things. Just remember that you are actually purchasing a beta and you won't be disappointed about the amount of money you spent.

Its not quite as bad on the Mac but its buggy but so superb that we all suffer through the bugs. I really wish Adobe or X-Rite would just put a huge pile of cash in Steve's hands, let him direct and get a team of programmers to clean it up. Its a labor of love but Steve really needs engineering support as ColorThink Pro is far, far from just a simple gamut viewer; its become big engineering.

It is not free, but I really like the Gamut Viewer that is part of the ProfileEditor Module of Gretag Macbeth's Profiler Pro suit of tools (expensive). I'm on Windows XP, and it never crashes on my systems. It has 3D viewing of multiple profile spaces in real or solid colors (check box selectable) with a transparency slider, and too many viewing options, including 2D, to describe quickly.

Gamut viewers really help to show the limitations of current WYSIWYG technology, and why the monitor image, cmyk press prints, and rgb inkjet prints sometimes do and sometimes don't match. But my own experience has been to use them as a rough guide, as the lower values are not accurate indications of actual results. This is probably due to 32 bit system limitations and large colorspaces.

I wish Photoshop had more than a simple soft proof and out-of-gamut check. It would be great if there was a plug-in or feature that let one compare (with transparency) the gamut of the image being worked on (especially if it was in raw or lab space) with various possible working colorspaces, with the gamut space of our output devices.

BTW, a few new LED backlit LCD monitors (expensive) are now available that have a much larger gamut than the usual flourescent backlit LCD monitors. Anybody using one like the Samsung XL20? Um, I guess I'll start a new post on that question.

Old, old post, but I thought I'd update to mention that the ArgyllCms freeware has the utility: iccgamutI don't know if the version of ArgyllCms at the time of the OP had this capability, but ver 1.5.1 (March, 2013) has it.

With the -v option, you are provided the "gamut volume". It also generates a MyGamut.gam file that can apparently be used to prepare a wire-graph (which I haven't as yet done).

I wonder if there is an icc standard for determining gamut volume. ColorThink and GamutWorks return very different numbers, and even shapes sometimes. I've had them even give opposite results between initial then optimized versions of i1 profiles, which is larger..